★★ Leaving the theater after viewing Reagan, I felt the opposite of how I imagine almost everyone else who liked the film probably felt. Instead of feeling the sunny optimism emblematic of the Gipper himself, I felt an overwhelming sense of depression and disappointment. Yet I also felt the opposite of how I assume people […]
★★ When a movie is less than good, it matters less where it lies within the chronological order of its franchise and more how it got to be its way. A little over a decade ago, Fede Alvarez rebooted The Evil Dead (1980). The final product was a misfire worth remembering only for the concentrated […]
★★ Richard Linklater and Glen Powell are not deep thinkers. Hit Man would be a much better film if they understood that. Linklater in particular has never evolved in his musings about life, human needs, and the sense of self after one, no more than two, semesters of college. If he took more than that, […]
★★ Entering the theater, a question occupied my mind: “what is Ridley Scott’s interest in Napoleon?” While leaving the theater, as the casualty numbers flashed across the screen, it occurred to me that I’m not sure Scott was even interested in Napoleon at all. Actually, I’m not sure Scott was interested in much of anything […]
★★ In his elder years, Steven Spielberg, my favorite filmmaker, has outsourced his creative instincts to an inferior. Now that inferior has both politicized and trivialized his own life story, and Spielberg can only play to its hits like a copycat. The Fabelmans is perhaps the least affecting film Spielberg has ever made. So disjointed […]
★★ Usually a movie that gets two stars from me gets it because despite my disappointment with it, I’m unable to care enough to downgrade its score further. But there is another kind of 2-star picture – the kind that wildly swings between very strong high points and other moments that are so pathetic that […]
★★ It won’t be as easy to dismiss Avatar: The Way of Water as it was the first. The closest I can get is to call it “Whale Wars: The Avatar Movie.” But that’s less instinctively intuitive than what everyone called the first: “Dances with Wolves and/or Pocahontas in space with blue cat people.” I’m […]
★★ The end credits replay the Rage Against the Machine song that had famously closed The Matrix. While Rage was always only ever good for its guitar, the new version is a kidz-bop style shallow cover. Ironic that a song called “Wake Up” can put you to sleep; but credit where due – this is […]
★★ Steven Spielberg (without Tony Kushner) already made a musical. It was called Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. In that film, anything went. In West Side Story (2021), nothing did. When the two leads aren’t there, the picture is occasionally tolerable. Like the original, the two leads are the least interesting pieces of […]
★★ Two years ago, I saw Ready Player One. My feelings for that film went beyond professional appreciation. It touched a nerve the way no movie had in probably at least a decade before it. What I liked most about it was how true it felt to the experience of having a deep personal connection […]
V for Verbatim 